From the archive, 8 November 1975: Masterpieces, medicine and bedside tables

[James] Joyce's Nora was what you would call a scrubber nowadays. He met her while she was skivvying in a pub. Once settled in Trieste she used to sit around all day in sexy knickers blowing bubbles; apparently, the bubble pipe was all the rage then, like the hulahoop is now. I have been reading the new biography of Joyce by Stan Gebler Davies for a Punch review and I have turned into Joyce. But where's my Nora with the sexy drawers and bubble pipe?

God spare me from sensible literary ladies, blue of nose and stocking, but here is Margaret Forster writing in the Guardian saying something I would have liked to say. "I do wish the Booker judges and all the other literary know-alls would stop moaning about not being able to find any masterpieces among contemporary novels. Who wants masterpieces all the time?" she asks. The Booker Prize people complained that no one wrote Ulysses again this year. Margaret Forster says novels should not be priceless but obtainable, wearable, and enjoyed, she looks along her bookshelves at the 30 or so new novels she's read in the past three months and there's not a prize among them.

One of the problems is that the boutique revolution has made eccentricity OK and you can paint a chromo and go out and cut off your ear and get dressed up like Augustus John and no one will notice. So what's the point of writing masterpieces any more if you can't have the reward of eccentricity? Why bother burning off the midnight oil writing; especially with the price of electricity today? But the elitists have all the best arguments – of the head, if not the heart, and thank God for Margaret Forster. I look at my bedside table and it is, however, encrusted with masterpieces. Just check your bedside reading and you'll know what's going on in your head.

All the children are down with this new 'flu. My bedside table's got Sir Arthur Quiller Couch's On the Art of Writing, Nabokov's Ada, Celiene's Journey to the End of the Night, Shaft's Carnival of Killers, Ezra Pound's The ABC of Reading, W. B. Yeats's selected poetry, Culpepper on plants and herbs, Simone de Beauvoir's The Marquis de Sade, Baseball's Greatest Teams, The Complete Plays and Poems of T. S. Eliot, the Marx Brothers scrapbook, five years of Wisden, George Melly's Revolt into Style, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Stuart Gilbert's Study of Ulysses, a sticky heap of medicine for this new 'flu, plus a note to myself reminding me that what does it matter so long as you've got your health.

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